Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War was a war that was fought from the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937 until Japan's surrender on 9 September 1945 at the end of World War II. The war followed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Chinese partisan warfare against the puppet state of Manchukuo from 1931 to 1937, and Japan caused the war by attacking the Republic of China's soldiers near the Marco Polo Bridge in Peking (Beijing) in northern China. Japan claimed that the Chinese had attacked them, and the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China. Japanese troops ravaged the countryside, raped and massacred millions of Chinese peasants (including the Rape of Nanking), and conducted counter-insurgency warfare against communists while launching massive offensives against the Kuomintang. The Japanese overwhelmed much of the Chinese coast in a series of surprise attacks, but the war became a stalemate by 1940, and the arrival of Allied aid to China and a US trade embargo against Japan led to the Japanese suffering from resource shortages.

On 7 Decemer 1941, Japan expanded the war to Southeast Asia and the Pacific with surprise attacks against the United Kingdom and United States, leading to the war becoming a mere theater of the greater World War II. On 9 September 1945, the Japanese were forced to surrender as the Soviet Red Army invaded Manchuria and Korea and as the United States bombed Japanese cities relentlessly. The war left 25,000,000 civilians and 4,000,000 military personnel dead in one of the deadliest wars in history, and the Nationalist and Communist Chinese factions nearly immediately resumed the Chinese Civil War after the war with Japan ended.